The present disclosure relates to product configuration.
Companies across a variety of industries routinely face the challenges of complex value chains, with end customers purchasing directly and through distribution partners, manufacturer reps, and contract manufacturers across multiple regions. This distributed sales process often makes it difficult for organizations to obtain accurate visibility into demand. In addition, complex pricing rules and a large number of special pricing deals can hinder quote turnaround time and pricing consistency. These factors can impact an organization's ability to convert quotes into orders quickly and efficiently, thereby resulting in lost sales.
In addition, providing quotes for complex products and services can be very challenging because it often requires consideration of numerous different options and rules. Due to this complexity, existing configuration systems are often inflexible, slow, and unable to easily accommodate the needs of its end users. In some cases, users of these systems must generally receive advanced training in order to understand how to define and input the rules for a given product or service, which drives up costs and reduces efficiency. In addition, customers often want to change, cancel, or renew services or products that were configured and sold to them using these systems. However, this is often difficult to do using these systems because, in many cases, such changes have to be handled manually or completed by system administrators who have the technical knowledge needed to make such changes, which can delay turnaround and lead to user and customer frustration.